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How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back
Synopsis Hermes Conrad is excited because the Central Bureaucracy is conducting an inspection the next day, and he expects to be promoted to a Grade 35 bureaucrat. Leela hosts a poker game with her former co-workers from the cryogenics lab at the office that night, and Bender cheats via the use of X-ray glasses. On the run from the other players, he takes refuge in Hermes’ office, but the other players find him, and the savage beating he receives trashes the office. The mess in his office loses Hermes his promotion, and the inspector, Morgan Proctor (voiced by Nora Dunn), places a suicidal Hermes on paid vacation ("the ultimate penalty") and appoints herself acting Planet Express bureaucrat. Doctor Zoidberg suggests Hermes and his wife LaBarbara take a trip to Spa 5, the sauna planet that gives him a bucket of krill for every patient he sends there. Fry gains a new title: Executive Delivery Boy. Morgan Proctor, who has a fetish for slovenly men (in her words, she is "surrounded by neat freaks all the time"), begins a secret affair with Fry (a "dirty, dirty boy!"), while Hermes and his wife discover that Spa 5 is actually a forced labor camp. After Bender discovers the illicit affair, Morgan downloads his personality and intelligence to a disk, turning him into a mindless drone, who can only say "I am Bender, please insert girder." She also sends the disk off to the Central Bureaucracy for filing. Hermes begins to use his natural managerial skills to reorganize the labor camp for efficiency, oblivious to the torment of his fellow workers. The rest of the Planet Express staff infiltrate the Central Bureaucracy in order to recover Bender’s mind. One of the many employees they encounter is a Beholder, a Dungeons and Dragons monster, who simply hopes not to be exposed for sleeping on the job. They discover the master in-pile, an enormous pile of pneumatic tube capsules, only one of which contains Bender’s brain. The Planet Express staff is daunted by the giant pile, but Hermes has returned from Spa 5. He had made the labor camp so efficient that they only needed one Australian man to perform the labor. In a musical number, Hermes sorts the master in-pile, recovering the disk with Bender’s personality. He is restored to his original rank (a Grade 36 bureaucrat) by the head of the Central Bureaucracy for sorting the master in-pile, but immediately demoted to Grade 38 for finishing two seconds early (something bureaucrats should never do). Since Morgan was still in charge of Planet Express, she fires Fry for exposing her affair. However, Hermes exposes a mistake Morgan made on her high school prom date papers, having stamped it only four times instead of the standard five. Number 1.0 promotes him to grade 37 for this, and in turn, orders his assistants to get the papers needed to have Morgan taken away. The Professor re-hires Hermes, at severely reduced pay, and Fry asks if he can come back at a severely reduced pay as well. Hermes lets him and then gives severely reduced pay for everyone. Zoidberg begins his own musical number but the show immediately ends. Continuity * Leela's old co-workers from "Space Pilot 3000" appear. * The Australian Man who Hermes forced to do all the work in Spa 5 is later seen as a Sphynx building slave in episode "A Pharaoh to Remember." His design is based on Paul Hogan as Crocodile Dundee.needed * Morgan is grade 19 while Hermes is grade 36; he is then demoted to 38, then promoted to 37. Quotes * Zoidberg: "Leela! Fry! Robot! Whatever you're doing tonight, I'm available! References Explained *The title references the 1998 film and popular novel How Stella Got Her Groove Back. * While stamping forms, Hermes sings "Stamp it, file it, send it overnight." a parody of "Get Up, Stand Up", a song by Bob Marley. * Zoidberg says "Finally I have a good claw, three human females, a number, and a king giving himself brain surgery!" the last refers to the King of Hearts. * While talking to the techie about where the central filing office is, the computer in the background displays a screen similar to the computer screens seen in THe Matrix. Production Notes * LaBarbara's line "Spa 5? Is it good?" is read not by her voice actress Dawnn Lewis, but by Tress MacNeille, who recorded the temp lines (presumably for the animatic). This is mentioned in the audio commentary for the episode. * When Hermes is attempting to sort the master pile, he is told that he has only four minutes. He musically completes the task in just over a minute and a half (assuming the song takes place in real-time). He is told that he finished 2 seconds early. Easter Eggs